Group releases 1.6 million usernames, passwords in protest of new UN Internet regulation proposals

A hacking group has dumped a massive amount of personal info to the Web in protest of the UN's new Internet regulation proposals.

Calling themselves "Team Ghostshell", the group has published 1.6 million usernames and passwords taken from the European Space Agency, the Center for Advanced Engineering, the aerospace contractor Crestwood Technology Group, Bigelow Aerospace, General Dynamics, the Japanese photonics firm Hamamatsu, a nanotechnology industry group, and a few others, adds Forbes.

Mainly, the group is angry at the UN body International Telecommunications Union, who is trying to "give U.N. countries' governments a stronger mandate over the Internet traffic flowing through their territory and allow control of domain name allocations by a central U.N. body."

Reads Ghostshell's post: "The ITU is hosting a meeting right now that may very well decide the fate of how the [internet] will be managed in the future. Basically the UN may very well give total power to the ITU on how to handle everything. The data dump is promoting hacktivism worldwide and drawing attention to the freedom of information on the net. For those two factors we have prepared a juicy release of 1.6 million accounts/records from fields such as aerospace, nanotechnology, banking, law, education, government, military, all kinds of wacky companies & corporations working for the department of defense, airlines and more."

Google has also loudly protested the new proposal, and submitted a million-signature petition opposing it.

5 user comments

I don't get what aerospace and advanced technology research groups have to do with the UN or the internet. They should have targeted and released information from the groups and individuals that support and lobby for internet regulation like; Hollywood lobbyists, the WTO, Religious and Moralist organizations, Bureaucrats from member states, all the designated negotiators from countries that support these regulations, companies that make the software and hardware for monitoring and control, ISP's that cooperate with governments.

In any case, that is a sweet graphic they have, my compliments to the graphic designer.

I don't see how releasing all this information is proving that freedom on the net is a good thing.... In fact if the countries involved had their way security breaches like this could be prevented. Perhaps releasing information about the UN or the communist countries trying to get the laws passed would be more prudent. All they've done here is piss off a whole lot of corporations that may have been in favor of the current internet, but of course now they might rethink that.